What was the first significant magical realism novel? Many readers will point you in the direction of Gabriel García Márquez, whose 1967 workOne Hundred Years of Solitude did much to legitimize the incorporation of magicand fantasy in literary fiction. Others might call attention toAlejo Carpentier, the Cubannovelist whose 1949 novelThe Kingdom of this Worldanticipated Márquez in itscombination of myth andLatin American history in afictional account that leavensits intense social realism witha modest dose of the phantas-magorical. Or perhaps theywill acknowledge Jorge LuisBorges or Arturo Uslar Pietri as the first magical realist. Still others would refer to European forebears, seeing Franz Kafka or Italo Calvino or Günter Grass as the true pioneers, innovators who had perfected the recipe for magical realism before it became associated with Hispanic authors.

Frankly, I am always amazed at these suggestions—with imply that the artful mixture of magical and realistic elements in a work of fiction is a modern conceit. Indeed, this combination is as old as storytelling itself. The only new twist added in recent decades has been the use of "magical realism" as a marketing label—favored by publishers who don't want their authors put on the same shelf as genre writers. The degree to which critics and academics play along with this commercially-motivated distortion—a subject I will write about at a later date—is a sad example of groupthink, and an indicator of how readily marketing categories have been adopted by the very people whose job it is to scrutinize and question their applicability.

Let's be honest, more than one thousand years of magical realism preceded One Hundred Years of Solitude. My choice for the first magical realism novel dates back to the second century AD, and came from the hand of a North African author. Around the year 125, Lucius Apuleius was born in Madaurus (now M'Daourouch in present-day Algeria), a Roman colony famous as a center of learning. St. Augustine studied there, and later complained about the pagan tendencies of the local populace, as did the Roman grammarian Nonius Marcellus. Apuleius, however, was much more than a product of local influences. He was widely traveled and well educated: he first studied at Carthage, before immersing himself in Platonist philosophy in Athens, and later learned Latin during a stay in Rome. He adopted a colorful style of that language for his most famous work, The Golden Ass, which is the only ancient Latin novel to have survived in a complete form.

Apuleius was well equipped to incorporate elements of magic into his storytelling—he was once accused of practicing magic, and his courtroom defense has survived. This document, known as A Discourse on Magic, is more admired for its wit than as a source of information on wizardry; but it does give Apuleius an edge over Kafka or Márquez and the other illustrious modernists who could never convince anyone they were actual sorcerers! Apuleius also brought other valuable first-hand experiences to bear on his writing, not just his extensive travels and broad-based education, but also his participation in the ancient mystery cults. The latter appear in the plot of The Golden Ass, when the hero Lucius is initiated into the cult of Isis.

The story opens with Lucius's journey to Hypata (modern day Ypati) in Greece, where he stays as a guest in the house of the miser Milo. He is warned against Milo's wife Pamphile, "a well known witch and said to be a past mistress of every kind of necromancy." But the young man's curiosity is stronger than his common sense, and he aims to imitate the magic with which his hostess changes herself into a bird. His attempt goes awry, and Lucius discovers that, instead of flying off as a winged creature, he has turned himself into ajackass.

Misfortune follows misfortune, as Lucius the ass is beaten, chased, and eventually stolen by thieves. Yet in the midst of this adventure, Apuleius changes course and incorporates a long story-within-a-story into his novel—the most extensiveof several such interludes in The Golden Ass. "Once upon a time there lived a king and queen who had three very beautiful daughters..." begins an old woman accomplice of the thieves—who proceeds to relate the mythical tale of Cupid and Psyche, an early forerunner of the story of "Beauty and the Beast." This account comprises almost a fifth of the entire book, and is sometimes anthologized as a stand-alone novella. (Apuleius's narrative has also inspired some provocative commentary—see for example Erich Neumann's Jungian study of the myth.)

Apuleius is always pleased to have the opportunity for a lengthy digression, and his readers come to share his enthusiasm for such colorful asides. Our author is a charming raconteur, and his work anticipates later picaresque novels by Cervantes, Rabelais and others. The Golden Ass is also an important forerunner of those famous literary compendiums of folktales, such as the Decameronand The Canterbury Tales. The fluid transformation of people into animals would eventually serve as fodder for modernist works, such as Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (indeed, Apuleius’s novel is sometimes referred to under the title Metamorphoses) and Orwell's Animal Farm—recall that book’s closing lines: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." The concept also appears in Latin American works of magical realism such as Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World or Carlos Fuentes's Holy Place.

But I would be remiss if I did not point out the connections between Apuleius’s masterwork and genre fiction. Indeed, if you dislike genre stories, you are advised to keep away from The Golden Ass, for almost every major genre is represented here. You will find fantasy, romance, adventure, travel, suspense, comedy, mystery and horror in these pages—and sometimes jumbled together in a manner that still seems avant-garde so many centuries later. But if I were forced to identify this literary work under a single label, I would opt for the broadest and most felicitous of them all: it is an example of storytelling, plain and simple. And the storyteller is less concerned about the purity of literary forms or the conventions of genre fiction, than about pacing, plotting and—above all—holding the interest of the audience.

His success in that regard is Apuleius’s great achievement and his chief legacy to us. Apuleius's translator Robert Graves quotes Pliny's description of a street corner storyteller, who would tell passers-by: "Give me a copper and I’ll tell you a golden story." We can do no better than turn to Apuleius for a sense of the spell those early public tellers of tales must have cast on their audience. Finally, if I am right in seeing a return to storytelling as one of the key developments—perhaps the primary one—in the current literary environment, then Apuleius may be more timely than ever. Or, put another way, the first magical realism novel remains a valid role model today, appealing to us not just for its historical interest or influence, but as a vital text that speaks to us with a familiarity and appeal that belies its antiquity.Essay published on February 13, 2012

Welcome to my year of magical reading. Each week during the course of 2012, I will explore an important work of fiction that incorporates elements of magic, fantasy or the surreal. My choices will cross conventional boundary lines of genre, style and historical period—indeed, one of my intentions in this project is to show how the conventional labels applied to these works have become constraining, deadening and misleading.

In its earliest days, storytelling almost always partook of the magical. Only in recent years have we segregated works arising from this venerable tradition into publishing industry categories such as "magical realism" or "paranormal" or "fantasy" or some other 'genre' pigeonhole. These labels are not without their value, but too often they have blinded us to the rich and multidimensional heritage beyond category that these works share.

This larger heritage is mimicked in our individual lives: most of us first experienced the joys of narrative fiction through stories of myth and magic, the fanciful and phantasmagorical; but only a very few retain into adulthood this sense of the kind of enchantment possible only through storytelling. As such, revisiting this stream of fiction from a mature, literate perspective both broadens our horizons and allows us to recapture some of that magic in our imaginative lives.